


all the stars in the sky

by mnemememory



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Guardians of the Galaxy AU, I think I'm funny, Who tf knows, i'm having fun though, what am I even doing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 16:29:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19890883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemememory/pseuds/mnemememory
Summary: Guardians of the Galaxy AU where Beau and Jester are simultaneously better and worse than Starlord, Yasha and Molly are Gamora, Nott is not a genetically modified raccoon (but she's just as good at blowing things up), Caleb is Groot, Fjord has less tattoos than Drax and Caduceus is confused.INFREQUENT UPDATES





	all the stars in the sky

...

...

**all the stars in the sky**

...

...

"Beau," Jester says, waving her hands through the holographic images of happy people. "I don't think this is such a good idea."

Beau keeps walking forward, footsteps echoing through the ruined cityscape. She tries not to look at the holograms too closely - she knows that Jester enjoys decorating her maps with whatever flavour text she can get her hands on, but Beau finds the whole thing just a little too lifelike to properly enjoy. Especially when that involves looking at the faces of dead people.

"Dairon is going to be mad," Jester says, hurrying to catch up. Her map flickers out for a second as they enter a new quadrant, and than springs to life. Children run across the cracked stone ground in a loop. Beau closes her eyes to steady herself.

"Dairon is always mad," Beau says. "And this is just a little side-job. There's nothing wrong with making a bit of extra money."

"Dairon is always mad at you," Jester corrects. She fidgets a little with her watch, and the hologram resets itself to contain only the architecture. Beau's tense muscles loosen a fraction. "She likes me. I'm her favourite."

That is blatantly untrue, and Beau refuses to acknowledge such lies. She turns her nose up in the air and keeps moving further into the ruined world.

The planet of Emon is eerie in its stillness. Towers stretch to skeletons, the twin suns red and dying. The light flickers ominously overhead. Beau has her night-vision goggles pushed back into her fringe in case things go dark. Jester doesn't need to worry - Tieflings never really had to worry about not being able to see - but Beau is Terran, is human, and she doesn't have any of those same natural advantages.

"Dairon doesn't have favourites," Beau says. "And if she did, it would most certainly be me."

Jester very maturely sticks her tongue out, hopping over a fissure in the ground. Her boot kicks against something that snarls, and Beau has her staff out and set to sear before she's even conscious of what she's doing.

Jester laughs. "Put that thing away," she says, kneeling down. There's a small, furred creature curled up in-between two rocks, fur dark and patchy. Jester soothes it out from its hiding place with careful words, smiling without showing her teeth. Beau can't even begin to understand how she does it. She had once had a messenger owl, and. Well. Things hadn't ended particularly well between them. She liked to think that he was still out there, somewhere, living his best life with the stars. But she doubted it.

"Hello there," Jester says, coaxing the thing into her hands. In the dim half-light it is revealed to be a startling red rather than the darker brown Beau had initially thought, long and slender. Jester pets it between the ears and it lets out a small croon.

Beau glances at her wrist. There's a timer in the corner of her screen, seconds ticking over and -

Beau's eyes narrow.

"Jester," she says.

"I'm going to name you Sprinkle," Jester tells the thing. Beau internally sighs. They're never going to get rid of it now.

"Jester," she says again. "Come on. We need to hurry up."

Jester sighs. "Okay, okay," she says, standing up. The creature squeaks, and Jester obligingly wraps it around her neck like furry scarf. Beau is almost jealous - it's fairly chilly in the dead light - but also that thing is probably infected with all kinds of diseases her Terran immune system couldn't hope to handle. She's learned the tough way that sometimes, just sometimes, being human in a galaxy of weirdo superheroes kind of sucks.

"This way," Jester says. The world around them glitches again, and the hologram resets itself a few frames away.

They go down.

The further into the ground they go, the less data that Jester has to work with. She umms and aahs about it, the little creature squeaking every so often into Jester's ear. Beau stays a few metres ahead, staff out. A mild current of electricity runs through the metal - not enough to burn, but definitely enough to stun.

"Just a little further," Jester says.

"You've said that for the past five minutes," Beau says.

"I got lost before," Jester says. "We shouldn't have gone own that last corner. But now I know where we are. Just a little further."

And then:

Beau hadn't quite imagined it properly. Emon was a dead thing, the centre of an empire that had long-since fallen to ruin. She's heard stories, of course, because the Cobalt Soul told stories. She's read books, of course, because they were the purveyors and providers of knowledge. She's heard of them all: Allura Vysoran, Kima of Vord, Vox Machina...

Stories.

The room in front of her is – everything she could have dreamed of, and everything she never wanted to see. The Council Chambers, adorned in cobweb lace and rotted tapestries. Beau catches her breath on the dust in the air and she feels like she's choking.

Jester keeps going forward. Jester has always been so good at putting one foot in front of the other, even in the presence of so much history. "This way," she says, and kneels in the middle of the chamber.

As she walks forward, the air transforms, the hologram stretching outward like magic. Beau's eyes widen as the rubble and rock are swept away underneath clear glass floors and glowing pillars of ice. The tapestries restitch themselves into intricate tableau's of life and death, characters waving sword-like instruments and riding upon enormous beasts. A table sits where Jester is kneeling, surrounded by people.

The Council.

Beau walks forward in a dream, eyes locked forward. The people around the room are still, unmoving – Beau can't quite reconcile their frozen faces with Jester's proclivity towards movement in her art. Her eyes are drawn to a tall, slender figure adorned in fire, eyes of burnished bronze glowing out of a pale half-moon face, cheeks littered with freckles. Tall antlers stretch towards the ceiling, holding back a wealth of red hair.

Keyleth of the Air Ashari.

"What do you think?" Jester asks, looking up from the floor with a wide smile on her face. "I didn't have time to animate them properly, but I got a whole lot of historical references -"

"They look real," Beau says, heart seizing in her chest.

Jester beams.

Beau kneels down next to her. Her skin prickles with the feeling of being watched, and she can't quite help but wish that Jester had made her holograms a little less realistic than she had.

"Here," Jester says, pressing her hand down on a floor tile. Her fingers glow blue for a second, and then bright pink sparks fly from her fingernails to dig into the cracks in the floor.

Beau watches as the ground splits apart, tiles jolting downwards to form a square opening. Slowly, the needle-point of a pyramid the size of Beau's thigh begins to pierce upwards, something round and metallic balanced on the very tip.

"Here it is," Jester says proudly, dusting the remaining sparks of pink light off of her hands and getting to her feet. "The orb!"

Beau grins, reaching out and -

Jester's holograms glitch out of existence, leaving the room in hollow darkness. Something hard and cold presses into the small of her back. Beau's fingers freeze millimetres from the orb.

"Good evening, ladies," a smooth voice says from behind her. "But I think we'll be taking that off your hands."

Jester looks up. "Oh, no," she says. "It's the...who are you?"

Beau retracts her hand and turns slowly around, making sure not to make any kind of obvious play towards the orb. The man is clearly drow, the purple skin highlighted through Beau's goggles. His cloak flares out dramatically around him. Beau would be impressed, if there hadn't been a blade stabbing painfully into the small of her back.

"Who I am is not important," the drow says. "Please step away."

Beau's fingers twitch towards her staff, but the blade digs a little deeper into the gaps in her armour. Beau lets out a short huff and steps to the side, making sure to telegraph her moves so she doesn't get turned into a human kebab.

Jester doesn't look too impressed. "I think that this is called cheating," she says. "You just followed us here, didn't you? That was very inconsiderate -"

"Please be quiet," the drow says. "Or I'm going to have to do some unpleasant things to this friend of yours."

"Beau's been stabbed before," Jester says, grinning.

"You're awfully confident for two scavengers going up against the might of Xhorhas."

Beau closes her eyes. The Dynasty. Great. Dairon was going to kill her.

"Well, Xhorhas isn't really here," Jester says, getting to her feet and brushing off her skirts. Pink sparks flew down the fabric to fizzle out at her feet. "I only see you."

"Yeah," Beau says, trying to casually lean away from the knife. "There's only one of you and two of us."

The knife follows Beau's unsubtle attempts to remain un-stabbed. With a sigh, the drow snaps his fingers.

"I see you're going to have to do this the hard way," he says, and Beau lunges away.

Jester is already there, gigantic lollipop-shaped weapon materialising within her hands to give the drow a good whack on the back of his head. Beau grabs onto the orb and stuffs it down her shirt. She grabs onto Jester's outstretched hand and they pop away in time to avoid a flurry of arrows.

They re-materialise back above ground, towards the upper crust of Emon. The ground roughens underneath their feet as they hurry forward, the stones giving way to badly cracked earth and loose dirt. In the distance behind them, something very large and very angry begins to yell.

"Dairon is not going to be happy with us," Jester says.

"Can you stop saying that?" Beau says miserably. She is not looking forward to the upcoming lecture.

Jester just sticks her tongue out at Beau. They parked _The Mistake_ an unfortunate distance away, and there are some days that Beau really regrets letting Jester name basically everything. Still, the name always seems to end up feeling brutally appropriate. Like now.

"Just a little further," Beau says. She risks a quick glance behind them and lets out a low curse. The Mistake might be small and well-maintained, but she was built for an entirely different skillset to Xhorhsian tortoise-ships, which (in addition to being very large and hard to destroy) packed a mean bite when things got down to it. And, apparently, the drow and his fellow companions had thought to park their entourage fairly close to the ruin, because they were gaining on them.

"Where are you, where are you," Beau says. She recognises the area vaguely, but that doesn't mean they're going to be able to find their cloaked ship with any sort of urgency. The rock formations all blend together under the weight of adrenalin that's burning through her veins, and Beau has to take a few deep breaths to centre herself. Remember your training, she thinks, but Jester is beside her and they've got three tortoise-ships in the air behind them and –

She slams into something very hard and very invisible.

"Found it," Beau says woozily. She shakes her head and rams around the metal plating for the release door button, only for Jester to push past her and do it in half the time it would have taken Beau.

They both rush forward and slam the door behind them, Beau hopping up onto the second level and scrambling to the controls.

"Buckle up," she calls back. "This is going to take a miracle!"

...

...

"I can't believe we survived that."

Jester groans in agreement from where she's tumbled off to the side of the ship, face smooshed into the metal wall. She doesn't appear to have any inclination to get up, and Beau kind of feels that same. She's slumped over the controls, sweating badly. She can feel blood slowly dripping from the wound in her back, and she isn't looking forward to peeling off her shirt anytime soon. Maybe if she soaked it first...

Of course, getting any sort of water out here was basically impossible, so Beau is probably going to have to settle for antiseptic and stinging for the rest of her life. There are very few things that Beau misses about Earth, but regular baths in water is one of them.

"We should get this back to Pumat."

"Can we take a break first?" Jester says.

"The sooner we get this thing to Pumat, the sooner we get paid," Beau says. She reaches down her shirt and pulls out the orb to study it.

It doesn't look especially valuable. Beau has been living around smugglers – well, technically "anarchists", but smuggling was a very convenient and profitable front, so Dairon didn't mind the occasional odd-job so much – basically Beau's whole life, and she knows how to spot valuable things. The metalwork is in good shape for something that's been living under the ruins of Emon for probably over a thousand years, but considering the workmanship that was commonly associated with that planet, that was hardly a surprise. The only reason they had known it was there was because of some very specific instructions from Pumat, and even then it had taken a solid fortnight of research to figure out how to narrow down the search from "planet" to "building". There's nothing – well, especially _interesting_ about it. It's more than a little disappointing.

"I want to go to a bathhouse," Jester says. "The last one we went to had a really cute girl who couldn't stop looking at you –"

Beau grimaces. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"It'll be fun!"

"How do you even get your eyes to sparkle like that?"

From the lower floor of _The Mistake_ , something bangs against the roof.

"Oh shit," Beau says.

Jester sighs. "Please tell me you didn't –"

From across the control room, the floor hatch slams open and an enraged shriek fills the cockpit. Beau cringes into her seat as a female halfling pulls herself onto the upper deck. She's barely dressed, muscles for days, and Beau has so many regrets right now. So many.

"Oh," she says, trying and failing to laugh. It comes out as more of a pathetic squeak, which is more than a little bit embarrassing. "I'm sorry, I completely" – forgot you were there. Beau stops herself from actually saying it, but from the way the halfling's eyes narrow to furious slits, it doesn't really help her face.

"Where am I," she snarls.

"Uh..."

"Hi, I'm Jester!" Jester says, beaming.

The halfling ignores her, eyes boring into Beau’s skull.

“We’ll take you back to the Creek, er –”

“Keg,” the halfling helpfully supplies.

“Keg,” Beau repeats weakly. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you home ASAP.”

Jester is laughing at her. Beau unsubtly elbows her.

Keg looks extremely unimpressed, but she does go back into the hold, which Beau is counting as progress.

“I’ll log in the coordinates for Shadyrun Creek, then,” Jester says, scratching underneath Sprinkle’s chin with a sparkling air of nonchalance that Beau kind of wants to kick out into space.

“…yeah,” she says, folding her arms across her chest and trying not to blush. “That’s probably a good idea.”

…

…

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know where this came from, but I'm definitely having fun :) if you like it, leave a comment and I might post the next chapter...sooner. At some point. Wait don't hold me to that. 
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](https://mnemememory.tumblr.com/)! I post shorter things that I don't put up on ao3.


End file.
